Archive for the ‘IRELAND’S GREATEST’ Category

8 Jun

THE CAR STARTER: Nicholas Callan & the ‘Model T’ Ford

Posted by seanduke in ENGINEERING, IRELAND'S GREATEST. Tagged: , , , , , , .


1926 was the first year that cars such as the Ford Model T roadster, pictured here, came with automatic starting batteries. Cars now started up at the turn of a switch thanks to technology developed by Irishman Nicholas Callan (Credit: automotivehistoryonline.com)

Up to 1926, all cars had to be ‘cranked up’ by hand, in order to get started. From that year onwards, Model-T Ford cars came with starting batteries, which meant that a car could be started without physical labour for the first time.

The technology that made this possible was the induction coil, which had been invented in the middle of the 19th century by Nicholas Callan, a priest and scientist, born in Co Louth that was based at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth.

Callan’s coil made it possible to massively ‘ramp up’ the power that could be supplied from a small battery. This was done by rapid interuptions of electrical current, which meant up to 600,000 volts could be produced from a 12 Volt battery.

This induction coil, or electrical ‘transformer’ technology, meant that sparks could be created that ignited the petrol in the car, sparked the pistons, and, this in turn, drove the crank shaft and powered the engine into life.

It was a technological breakthrough that made it far easier to operate cars, and made them more appealing to a mass market. Callan, however, did not get credit for his invention until at least the 1930s, some 70 years after his death.

LISTEN: Interview with Dr Neil McKeith, Curator of the National Science Museum at St Patrick’s College Maynooth (Nicholas Callan’s Alma Mater)

First broadcast on Science Spinning on 103.2 Dublin City FM

9 Feb

Great Scientists of Co Waterford

Posted by seanduke in IRELAND'S GREATEST. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .


Credit (Wiki)

Co Waterford in Ireland’s ‘sunny southeast’ has produced some of its greatest ever scientists.

Robert Boyle, born in Lismore, is considered one of the founding fathers of modern chemistry, and is famously remembered for Boyle’s Law, which says that pressure and volume, in a gas, are inversely proportional.

Ireland’s only ever Nobel Laureate in science, Ernest Walton, was born in Dungarvan, and famously was part of a team in the Cavendish Laboratory, at Cambridge, UK, that split the atom in 1932, and heralded in the atomic age.

Then there was Thomas Grubb, perhaps the most famous telescope maker of the Victorian era, who was involved with making the famous Birr Castle leviathan telescope that was the world’s largest for more than 70 years.

Listen: Interviews with Donald Brady and Eric Finch on the lives of Boyle, Walton and Grubb

Interviews originally broadcast on Science Spinning, on 103.2 Dublin City FM

3 Feb

Great Scientists of Co Offaly

Posted by seanduke in IRELAND'S GREATEST. Tagged: , , , , , , , .


 Credit (travelinireland.com)

Co Offaly, highlighted on the map on the right, might commonly be associated with our former Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, or great All-Ireland winning hurling and gaelic football teams, but it is not often associated with producing famous scientists.

Fact is, though, that this small midlands county, with a current population of just 76,806 (2011 Census) has produced at least three world class scientists: William and Charles Parsons and John Joly.

Today we’ll be talking to John Joyce, a retired scientist and tour guide at Birr Castle, the ancestral home of the Parsons family, about the lives and achievements of William and Charles Parsons, and to Patrick Wyse-Jackson, geologist, and curator of the TCD Geology Museum about the life of John Joly.

Listen:

Interview with John Joyce & Patrick Wyse Jackson discussing famous Offaly scientists

First broadcast on 2.02.2012 on Dublin City FM 

29 Jan

THE INVENTOR OF THE STEAM TURBINE: Charles Parsons

Posted by seanduke in ENGINEERING, IRELAND'S GREATEST. Tagged: , , , , , .


Charles Parson’s yacht Turbinia, pictured here, was powered by his steam turbine. He dramatically demonstrated its speed at the British Navy Review before Queen Victoria in 1897 when it was easily the fastest vessel on view. The British naval establishment was impressed and soon adopted the turbine in its latest battleships (credit: Wiki)

A plentiful supply of cheap electricity, and much faster passenger steamships and military battleships. These were some of the things made possible by Charles Parsons, who grew up in Birr, and invented the steam turbine in 1887.

Charles was born in 1854 and came from a brilliant scientific lineage. His father was the famous astronomer, William Parsons, who had built the world’s largest telescope on the grounds of Birr Castle in the 1840s.

The steam turbine invented by Charles, hugely increased the power that could be harnessed from a steam engine. The invention made him a rich man, and it changed the world.

LISTEN:   Charles Parsons interview with  Birr Castle tour guide, and retired scientist, John Joyce

First broadcast on 103.2 Dublin City FM

17 Jan

THE TELESCOPE KING: William Parsons

Posted by seanduke in ASTRONOMY, IRELAND'S GREATEST. Tagged: , , , , , .


The world’s largest telescope, seen here above, was for more than 70 years, the so-called Leviathan, built by William Parsons, the 3rd Earl of Rosse, and the local people of Birr, Co Offaly in 1845.

In the year the Great Famine officially began, the massive telescope at Birr Castle was put to work, peering out into the heavens and making new discoveries.

One of the discoveries made by the Earl, when using the telescope was that galaxies often formed into a spiral shape, and the first one of these spiral galaxies he discovered was the Crab Nebula.

The Earl was a genius with chemistry and materials, and this was crucial in the building of such an effective and powerful telescope, which people travelled from all over Europe and beyond to see.

Listen: Interview with John Joyce, Birr Castle Guide, on the life of William Parsons, the 3rd Earl of Rosse

First broadcast on Dublin City FM.

23 Nov

THE EARTHQUAKE DETECTIVE: Robert Mallett

Posted by seanduke in GEOLOGY, IRELAND'S GREATEST. Tagged: , , , , , , , , .


The first photographs ever taken of the aftermath of an earthquake were taken of the Great Neopolitan Quake of 1857, which destroyed the village of Pertosa, pictured here, and many other towns and villages in southern Italy. The pictures were taken by a Frenchman called Grellier, and commissioned by Irish scientist and Dubliner Robert Mallett who was the first to determine what caused earthquakes such as this one [Credit: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies].

Listen: Interview on Robert Mallett with Irish geophysicist, Tom Blake

First broadcast on 103.2 Dublin City FM 10/12/2009

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The science of seismology, which studies the power and energy unleashed by earthquakes, began life on a south Dublin beach in 1849 with an ingenious experiment carried out by one of Ireland’s greatest scientists. That scientist was Robert Mallett – a Dubliner widely recognized as the ‘father of seismology’. Widely recognized that is, outside Ireland, where he remains largely an unknown figure outside the scientific community.

A true blue Dub you might say, Robert Mallett was born on Capel Street, on the banks of the Liffey, on the 3rd June 1810. His father owned a successful iron foundry business. The legacy of this foundry’s success can still be seen today, on the iron railings around Trinity College, which are inscribed with the name R&J Mallett.

From an incredibly early age, Robert was interested in science, and in particular chemistry. From the age of perhaps two, or three, he had his own small laboratory set up in the family house, where he played with chemicals. Such was Robert’s enthusiasm for spending time in the lab, the story goes, that his parents used to lock him out of the lab in order to punish him for some misdeed.

Later, in his teenage years, he went down the road to TCD to study science. The science course at TCD at that time – the early part of the 19th century – was more like what we would recognise as engineering today – very technical. After his studies were complete he went back to work in the family business. He continued to have a fascination with all things science, and began to conduct experiments on how sound or energy moved through sand and rock.

KILLINEY

In October 1849, aged 39, Robert, and his son John, who was a chemistry student at TCD, decided to carry out a remarkable experiment on Killiney Beach. They wanted to prove that energy moved through sand and rock in waves that could be measured, and they designed a ‘controlled’ experiment to prove this was so.

The two Malletts buried a keg of gunpowder in the ground, and detonated it. They measured the energy wave that traveled through the sand at a distance of half a mile away, with a seismoscope. The experiment worked, and a seismic reading was generated that showed clearly, energy moved through sand in waves.

Robert also worked closely with William Rowan Hamilton, another great Irish scientist and mathematician. William had suggested to Robert that he might apply the laws of physics, as they apply to light, in order to describe how the energy generated by the explosion would pass through sand and rock (for the rock measurements he set up a seismoscope on nearby rocky Dalkey Island, rather than the sandy beach). Robert took William’s advice and Robert’s report on his experiment became the foundation of modern seismology.

ITALY

Robert is not well known in Ireland, except amongst the small community of geologists and earth scientists that would appreciate his importance in the advancement of our understanding of earthquakes.

However, in southern Italy Robert is well known, due to his role in studying the after affects of the ‘Great Neapolitan Earthquake of 1857′. This earthquake – which was the third biggest in recorded history at the time – struck in deadly fashion on the 16th December, and killed in the region of 20,000 people.

Robert reacted quickly and wanted to go to the earthquake zone and record the devastation, using the new technology of photography. Two powerful friends, Charles Lyle, a famous English geologist, and Charles Darwin, helped Robert to get a grant from the Royal Society to travel to Italy and carry out this work.

Robert arrived in Italy and worked right through Christmas and into the New Year, diligently recording the devastation along with a French photographer. This was the first time ever that photography had been used to take images of the after affects of an earthquake. It was a revolutionary approach at the time.

Robert’s report entitled ‘Great Neapolitan Earthquake of 1857: The First Principles of Observational Seismology’ was published by the Royal Society in 1862. It remains as ‘seminal research’ into seismic hazard and seismic risk, said Tom Blake, experimental officer in the geophysics section of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS).

The bicentenary of the birth of Robert Mallett was held in 2010 and the DIAS and the Royal Dublin Society had joint celebrations. This was done, said Tom Blake at the time, “so that, at least, once and for all, Irish people will understand, and know, that the father of controlled-source seismology is an Irishman – Robert Mallett”.

SEISMIC SCIENTISTS

In 132 AD, in China, a man called Zhang Heng, invented the world’s first seismometer – an instrument capable of measuring ground movements due to earthquakes. The machine Zhang invented enabled him to determine the direction and occurrence of the epicenter of an earthquake. For example, his device could pinpoint an earthquake occurring at a location 400 miles away, long before horse-bound messengers could bring the Emperor the bad news. This enabled the Emperor to quickly dispatch help to the afflicted area.

The west was far behind China in seismic studies. As late as 1755, more than 1,600 years after China had invented the first seismometer, people believed that the Great Lisbon Earthquake of that year, which killed 70,000 with an accompanying tsunami, was God’s punishment for the sins of mankind.

Not everyone in the west believed in the ‘God’ explanation for earthquakes in the 18th century. One of those was John Mitchell, a clergyman, and academic at Cambridge University. Mitchell proposed that earthquakes caused by energy waves originated below ground. At the time, his theory was largely ignored.

In 1795, Ascanio Filomarino devised a seismograph similar to the one Zhang had invented centuries before. It had a part that would stay stationary while the rest of the instrument would shake when an earthquake was occurring, and ring bells and set off a clock. Poor Ascanio was murdered on Mt Vesuvius by an angry mob that didn’t like his work. They also burned his workshop and destroyed his seismograph.

Another early ‘seismograph’ was developed by Luigi Palmieri, in 1855. Palmieri was the director of an observatory near Vesuvius. An instrument, designed by Palmieri, could measure small tremblings in the ground around Vesuvius, and recorded such movements on a paper strip – like later seismographs.

The big contribution of Robert Mallett to this emerging field came in 1857 when he examined the damage caused by the earthquake in Italy of that year. He generated isoseismal maps, which displayed contours of damage intensity. He also published a world map that revealed the clustering of earthquake incidences in specific locations around the planet. Thus, Mallett, was the first to see the ‘big picture’ with regard to earthquakes.

First published in the September-October 2009 edition of Science Spin

How Irish Scientists Changed the World, by Seán Duke, is due for publication by Londubh Books in Spring 2012.

12 Oct

Dublin City of Science 2012, preview; John Tyndall, a life

Posted by seanduke in IRELAND'S GREATEST. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , .


Listen:  Dublin City of Science 2012 Preview; Tyndall, a Life

Broadcast on 103.2 Dublin City FM on 29th September 2011

In July next year, Dublin will be at the epicentre of European science as host to the prestigious  City of Science 2012 event.

PICTURE: Below shows the spectacular Convention Centre on the Liffey where next summer’s event will take place [Credit: the architecturalist.com] 

On today’s show, I’m talking to David Fahy, Dublin City of Science Director about what people can expect from next year’s show.

John Tyndall, from rural Co Carlow is credited with being the first to discover the presence of greenhouses gases in the atmosphere, and to explain why the sky is blue, among other things.

Recently, a major international atmospheric science conference was held in Dublin in Tyndall’s honour, and we talk today to Norman McMillan, a scientist that has extensively researched Tyndall’s life.

To get in touch with the show email: sciencespinning@dublincityfm.ie

5 Sep

A (GREENHOUSE) GAS MAN: John Tyndall

Posted by seanduke in CHEMISTRY, IRELAND'S GREATEST, SCIENCE SPIN. Tagged: , , , , , , .


John Tyndall of Leighlinbridge Co Carlow, pictured above, was the first to explain why the sky is blue and to discover ‘greenhouse gases’ in the Earth’s atmosphere (Credit: Wikipedia)

The first researcher to identify the ‘greenhouse effect’, to explain why the sky is blue, and to develop optically pure air – the foreruner of today’s cleanroom technology, which is used in the manufacture of high-tech electronic devices. These are just some of the many reasons why John Tyndall, from Leighlinbridge Co Carlow was certainly one of the most famous 19th century scientists in Britain and Ireland. A multi-talented man, he was also a brilliant science communicator, whose public lectures at the Royal Society in London were legendary, as were his many popular books on scientific topics. When he died in 1893 he died a rich and hugely successful man, leaving behind £22,000, the equivalent of £6 million today.  Not bad for a man born into a humble Protestant family in rural Ireland.

Tyndall’s ancestors were from Gloucestershire and had arrived in the southeast of Ireland in the 17th century. His background was certainly not a privileged one, and his father worked as a police constable. He attended local schools, where he learned subjects such as technical drawing and maths. He worked in Ireland for as a surveyor the Government doing land surveys and mapping, and moved to England in 1842, now in his early twenties and did the same. He benefitted from the railway building boom in the UK in the 1840s, and made a lot of money working for the railway companies, doing surveying work in that decade.

It seems, however, that although he was always adept at making money, money was not his God and he went into teaching in 1847 at an English boarding school in Hampshire. He moved to Germany a year later, to do a PhD under Robert Bunsen, of bunsen burner fame, at the University of Marburg.  He returned to England in 1851 and joined the Royal Society in London one year later. He would remain at the Royal Society all his working life, and became its Director.

Institute

The large and well-respected Tyndall National Institute in Cork was named in Tyndall’s honour. The reason the Institute named itself after him that is that he did a lot of research in areas that the Tyndall is interested in today such as the behaviour of light. Tyndall did some of the earliest investigations into the ‘guiding’ of light, and this is essentially what underlies optical fibre technology, which forms the basis for modern communications, particularly the Internet. He also did a lot of work on what would today be called ‘clean room’ technology. His work involved studying things that float in the air, and he developed some of the very earliest ‘optically pure’ air. Today, cleanrooms are used as manufacturing sites for producing advanced semi-conductors and opto-electronic devices.

Science communicator

Tyndall was a great believer in demonstrating things to students or the public in order to explain them. He gave lectures to the public on all kinds of topics, and he proved to be a brilliant natural science communicator and these lectures were very popular and attracted large crowds. This work also made him famous, and ultimately made him rich too.  He succeeded the famous Michael Faraday as  the Director of the Royal Institution and he continued the work of public outreach that Faraday had started. Tyndall was a brilliant 19th century ‘polymath’, meaning he was interested in lots of different things. He belived in getting the message over by actually demonstrating things to the general public. He was profilic, publishing many books, 17 in total, and wrote 145 scientific papers.

Personal life

He married late, at the age of 55, to a woman 25 years younger. They had no children. He left just over £22,000 pounds in his estate when he died in 1893. This was an enormous amount considering that a London police constable was paid about £80 per year at the time. If we do the comparative mathematics that means his estate was worth in the region of £6 million in today’s money.

He was someone who suffered considerable ill health. He slept badly, suffered from migranes and took ‘sleeping draughts’ to help him to sleep. These draughts were tonics used in the 19th century that people drank before bed to help them get to sleep. The draughts were administered to Tyndall by his wife, and

they proved to be Tyndall’s undoing as he died from an accidental overdose of chloral hydrate when his wife got some bottles mixed up. The woman was distraught, and no blame was attached to her at the subsequent inquest.

Aside from science, the other great passion in Tyndalls’ life was mountain climbing and each summer form 1856 onwards, he visited the Alps. He was the first to reach the top of the Weisshorn in 1861 and he climbed the Matterhorn in 1868, three years after the first ascent. He had caught the mountain climbing bug when visiting the Alps for scientific reasons. Today he has a glacier in Chile named after him as well as a mountain in California and another in Tasmania.

Legacy

There were a number of things Tyndall did which were ‘firsts’. He was the first to analyse the trace gases in the atmosphere by employing a technique that would later become infrared spectroscopy.  He used the technique to discover that there were traces of carbon dioxide and water vapour in the atmosphere. He concluded, showing brilliant insight, that they way that carbon dioxide and water vapour absorbed infrared radiation meant that they were keeping the Earth warm. He went further, and said without these two elements, life couldn’t exist on Earth.

He was the first scientist to attempt to describe precisely why the sky is blue. The simple version of his explanation is that it was all to do with the scattering of light. This was later replicated by Lord Raleigh, but Tyndall was the first to do it. He had many battles with creationists, who considered that life had arose spontaneously out of nothing. He showed that it was not possible for life to spring to life spontaneously through a simple experiment. He made a box very clean and took all the dirt out of the air, and waited. No life forms spontaneously arose.

Certainly, Tyndall is one of Ireland’s greatest ever scientists, and his influence over many areas, including science communication, remains strong to this day.

First published in the September-October 2011 edition of Science Spin

How Irish Scientists Changed the World, by Seán Duke, is due for publication by Londubh Books in 2012.

5 Jul

THE PULSAR SUPERSTAR: Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Posted by seanduke in COSMOLOGY, IRELAND'S GREATEST, PHYSICS, SCIENCE SPIN. Tagged: , , .


Co Armagh raised Jocelyn Bell Burnell was unfairly ignored for a Nobel Prize in 1974 when the Prize for her discovery of pulsars was awarded to a more senior colleague

Jocelyn Bell Burnell, pictured on the right, who grew up and was educated in Lurgan, discovered pulsars, a new family of incredibly compact tiny stars back in 1968. It was a discovery that many astronomers believed merited a Nobel Prize. The Nobel Committee agreed and a Prize was duly awarded for the discovery in 1974. The problem was the Prize went not to Jocelyn, but to her supervisor.

At the time she made the discovery, 67-year-old Jocelyn (who is still an active researcher) was a 24-year old post-graduate student. She was also a woman. Those things still mattered in science in the 1960s, and might have helped explain why the 1974 Nobel Prize for Physics, awarded for the pulsar discovery, went to Jocelyn’s male supervisor, Antony Hewish and his senior colleague Martin Ryle. Many astronomers are still unhappy about this decision and have openly suggested that Jocelyn should, at the very least, been a co-recipient of the Prize. That the two prize winners never felt the need to recognise Jocelyn’s work, is a scientific scandal.

Obstacles

It was far from certain that Jocelyn would attain the heights she has attained in science, and she had to overcome many obstacles in her path. She was born inBelfast, but spent most of her first 13 years in Lurgan. She failed the ’11 plus’ exam, the test that children take inBritainandNorthern Irelandbefore entering secondary school. This exam is crucial as it usually determines whether a child is admitted to a ‘grammar school’ where the focus is on getting students to university. Her failure at the 11 plus wasn’t fatal, as she had been attending the Grammar School in Lurgan, and the school agreed to keep her on for a few years before she went off to a boarding school inEngland. However, she did admit much later that the failure ‘shook her’, and she didn’t chose to mention it until she attained the status of Professor.

Looking back today, Jocelyn believes that the 11 plus curriculum at the time didn’t suit her, as she said there wasn’t any science in it. Her scientific ability was certainly obvious when she came top of her class in her first term in secondary school at Lurgan Grammar. However, before that, there was another hurdle to cross. That came when the girls and boys were segregated into two groups in her first year of secondary school. Jocelyn thought that the separation might have ‘something to do with sport’, but was horrified when she realised that the boys were being brought to the science lab, while the girls were being packed off to learn about domestic science. It was the1950s and girls in Lurgan, and all overIreland, north and south, weren’t given any encouragement to do science. Jocelyn’s parents decided to ‘kick up a fuss’ and, as a result she was permitted to join the boys doing science, along with the daughter of a local doctor, and one other girl. It was a close call, andIrelandalmost lost perhaps its most accomplished ever female scientist before she even had a chance to show what she could do.

She finished out her two remaining years in Lurgan Grammar and then it was off toEngland. Jocelyn’s family were Quakers, and there was a family tradition of sending the children to Quaker schools inEngland. Jocelyn attendedMountSchool, inYork. She recalls that it was good to get away from home, though traumatic to begin with. In England, in the Fifties, girls were not discouraged from doing science, so it was a different atmosphere to Ireland. Jocelyn did very well in her studies, despite what she recalls as a mixed standard of science teaching.

She made it through the roller-coaster of her primary and secondary school education to get accepted into Glasgow University to study science. There she did well enough to be accepted to do a PhD in the University of Cambridge, a truly world-class university, choc-a-block with Nobel prize winning scientists, then and now. She began her PhD in 1965, working under the supervision of the aforementioned Hewish. The aim of the research project she was involved with was to find quasars. Jocelyn describes quasars as being “big, big things like galaxies, but they are incredibly bright and they send out a lot of radio waves”. The idea was to search for quasars by looking at natural sources of radio waves in the cosmos using a telescope array.

An array is a group of linked telescopes, and a special array was constructed for the project at a four-acre site at the Mullard Astronomy Observatory near Cambridge. Jocelyn got stuck into the nitty-gritty of getting the project up and running, and spent her time initially banging stakes into the ground and connecting miles of copper wire. Finally, in July 1967, the array was ready.

Accidental

Jocelyn began the job of monitoring the sky for rapid fluctuations in radio waves that might indicate the presence of a quasar at a particular location. She had to read through literally miles of paper, and wade through mountains of data, searching for tell-tale signs of a quasar.

On the 6th August 1967, a few weeks after the array came online, Jocelyn noticed something. She described the discovery that would change her life to this reporter in an interview in 2010:

“It was totally accidental. I was doing the research project I had been set very conscientiously and happened across something unexpected. The analogy I use is imagine you are at some nice viewpoint making a video of the sunset and along comes another car and parks in the foreground and it’s got its hazard warning lights, its blinkers on, and it spoils your video. Well my project was looking at quasars, which are some of the most distant things in the universe. [quasars] are big, big things like galaxies, but they are incredibly bright and they send out a lot

of radio waves, which is what I was picking up. [I was] studying these distant quasars and something in the foreground sort of went ‘yo-hoo’! – not very loudly shall we say it was a pretty faint signal, but it turned out after a lot of checking up, and a lot of persistence to be an incredible kind of new star, which we have called a pulsar – pulsating radio star.”

“They are tiny as stars go, they are only about 10 miles across, but they weigh the same as a typical star so they are very, very compact. The radio waves were coming naturally from some kind of star. We picked up these pulses and they were so unexpected that the first thing you have to do is suspect is that there is something wrong with the equipment, then suspect there is interference and then suspect something else, gradually force yourself to believe that it is something astronomical and it’s out there in the galaxy. The excitement came when I found the second one, because that really then begins to look like this is a new population we’ve discovered and we’ve just got the tip of the iceberg.”

Inside a few weeks Jocelyn had discovered three more radio wave sources that were behaving in the same way. This proved beyond doubt that here was a new, real and probably entirely natural phenomenon, though there was some talk – only partly in jest – about the possibility that these pulsating radio waves were being sent across the Universe by an alien intelligence.

A paper in Nature, the renowned scientific journal followed and it was published on the 24th February 1968. The press interest was huge after the paper came out, and Jocelyn and other people in the lab did a series of newspaper, radio and television interviews. Somehow she managed to get back to finishing her PhD, which she did in September 1968. But her life had changed, and she had become an overnight scientific celebrity, still only in her mid twenties.

Jocelyn said that the practical importance of her new found fame was that she never found it difficult to pick up a job when she was travelling around Britain with her husband, Martin Bell. He was a civil servant that regularly moved from city to city. Jocelyn followed him and worked part time for many years raising their son Gavin, who was born in 1973, and is also a physicist.

The down-side of achieving fame and success at an early stage was – as Jocelyn said to this reporter – that people expected her to come up with amazing discoveries all the time. A discovery such as finding pulsars comes only about once per decade in the astronomical community as a whole, and so it is a bit hard, she suggested, to live up to such expectations.

These days she continues to work as a Visiting Professor of Astrophysics at Oxford University where she is free to conduct research without too many other duties being imposed on her. Whatever she might do before she retires, her scientific legacy is secure. In 2010, a pulsar conference was held in Sardinia to honour her 45 years in science and to ‘christen’ a new radio telescope. A long-time colleague Australian pulsar researcher, Dick Manchester, was asked to deliver a speech at the conference, detailing Jocelyn’s contribution to science.

He said:

“I think Jocelyn’s fame is greater because she didn’t receive the Nobel Prize in 1974 than it would have been if she had. I believe that the furore that her lack of recognition caused resulted in a change of attitude by the Nobel Committee and I’m sure more widely as well, with a heightened awareness of the role of students in projects and the role of women in science.”

First published in the July-August edition of Science Spin

How Irish Scientists Changed the World, by Seán Duke, is due for publication by Londubh Books in 2012.

4 May

THE ATOM SPLITTER: Ernest Walton

Posted by seanduke in CAREERS, IRELAND'S GREATEST, PHYSICS, SCIENCE SPIN. Tagged: , , , , .


In 1932, aged 29, Waterford-born Ernest Walton, pictured here on the right, did something remarkable – he split the atom, or the atomic nucleus to be more precise, and the news stunned the world.
This colossal event in the history of science took place in Cambridge, UK, in the Cavendish Laboratory, a world-famous laboratory run by Lord Ernest Rutherford, a New Zealander. Rutherford had won a Nobel Prize for physics in 1908 and was a huge figure in science in general and nuclear physics in particular.
Walton, meanwhile, was a brilliant apparatus man, a hands-on physicist, and he had personally built the particle accelerator machine that enabled the nucleus to be split. He worked closely with John Cockcroft, who was a theoretician. They were a perfect team. Cockcroft proved it could be done, and Walton then went and did it.

Newspapers around the world reported the news, and the Albert Einstein himself called to the Cavendish Lab to congratulate Walton and Cockcroft.

For Einstein, this experiment was the first solid evidence to support his famous equation e = mc2 which held that energy and mass were linked, and that it was possible to release enormous amounts of energy – if mass could be split apart.

EXPERIMENT 
The key to the success of the famous atom splitting experiment was perhaps the inspired decision by Lord Rutherford, Head of the Cavendish, to pair the hands-on Walton, with the theoretician Cockcroft.

Rutherford, recognised the talents of the two young geniuses at his disposal, and put them together. They were very different, but complimented each other.

At this time, The Cavendish and other labs, particularly in the US were in a race to see who could split the atomic nucleus first. The general thinking at the time was that particles, protons would need to be accelerated to very high speeds, at astronomically high electrical voltages – perhaps as high as one million volts – to make it possible for them to slam into atomic nuclei and split them.

Walton had done his PhD in the generation of high voltages and this was a continuation of that work. He got the voltage up towards 800,000 volts and they decided they would try and experiment and see what happened.

Walton got the machine going and crawled back across the floor of the lab towards a lead-roofed observation box – to protect against x-rays and high voltages. The protons were being slammed into a piece of lithium metal and he took at look now at the impact. He immediately began seeing little flashes.

He was elated, as the flashes, he knew could be an indication that the lithium atoms were being split into two helium nuclei, also known as ‘alpha particles’ which had been first discovered by Rutherford himself three decades earlier. Walton immediately called Cockcroft to come, he knew something was happening. He later described what looked like ‘twinkling stars’ – lots of them.

Cockcroft arrived, and Rutherford then appeared. The two younger men manoeuvred Rutherford into the small observation hut, which wasn’t easy, as he was a big man, it was a tight space, and, at this stage, the great man, wasn’t young either.

Philip, Ernest’s son, and himself a Professor of Physics at NUI Galway (recently retired) recalled what his father told him happened next. “He (Rutherford) was shouting out instructions – ‘turn up the voltage’, ‘turn down the voltage’ and whatnot. He got out, and without saying anything at first, he walked across the room, perched himself on a stool and said: “Those look mighty like alpha particles to me – I should know, as I was in at their birth.”

The atomic age had begun.

FIGURE 
Walton was an unlikely figure to be thrown into the media maelstrom that occurred after the 1932 experiment. It changed his life forever, and at a time when most scientists are only getting their careers started he had reached his pinnacle.

He was a strongly religious man all his life –  the son of a Methodist preacher who had travelled all over Ireland and lived in many towns on both sides of the border, including Cookstown, Bambridge, Dungarvan, Armagh and Drogheda.

Sunday’s were for religious service and nothing more, whereas every other day was all about work. He was also a non-drinker, with a few close, loyal friends.

He had attended Methodist College in Belfast as a border, where he was ‘Head Boy’ and he had developed a strong affection, which was returned for the school’s ‘Head Girl’, Breda. After they left school they went their separate ways, but after a chance meeting the relationship was re-ignited and the letters flew back and forth.

He returned to Ireland in 1934, not least because he wanted to marry Breda, who was working as a teacher in Waterford. They were duly married in Dublin, and set about raising a family from their home in St Kevin’s Park, in Dartry, Dublin 6.

Walton returned from Cambridge to head up an ailing Physics department, with just three staff. His workload was huge in terms of administration, and teaching. This all mean that from the time he returned Ireland, to TCD, he did little research.

He died in 1995, aged 92, and is remembered fondly by his colleagues and family as a quiet man, who had no interest in the limelight. Often he would sit in the staff room at TCD quietly humming a tune, when a visitor would come in, and be stunned to be introduced to Ernest Walton, the giant of Physics that split the atom.

Many students will remember him as a brilliant teacher, who often performed experiments on the bench, in front of the students during a physics lecture. His son Philip, the recently retired Professor of Physics at NUI Galway, recalls that his father spent many long hours in the attic at home, after dinner, preparing his lectures.

Others will remember him at the Young Scientist Exhibition in the RDS for many years, when he could be found in teacher mode surrounded by an enraptured audience. For ETS Walton, teaching was a very important part of the scientist’s job.

To this day he remains the only Irishman who has been awarded a Nobel Prize in any field of science. That was in 1951, 22 years after the atomic nuclei was split.

This article was first published in the May-June issue of Science Spin

How Irish Scientists Changed the World, by Seán Duke, is due for publication by Londubh Books in 2012.

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